Street Magic

month."
    "The new moon sex rituals," said Abby sagely. She looked Pete over and dismissed her in the space of a heartbeat. "May I ask you a question?" she demanded of Jack, tilting her heavy black beehive to one side in an expression that Pete supposed would be coquettish if Abby hadn't been made up like a dead porcelain doll.
    "Anything, my dear," Jack said.
    "Where have you
been
, all this time?" Abby chewed on her thin lower lip. "I mean, we
all,"
—she gestured at the dancers—"have our theories."
    "And wagers," said Arty with a shift of interest. "Personally, I say you were pinched by the common police and spent the last dozen years being buggered over at Pentonville." He took a swig of his pint, face knobby with belligerence. "So where'ye been, Winter?"
    Jack leaned close to Arty, meeting the boy's kohled eyes. He held there, his lips parted and barely an inch from Arty's ear, until Arty stilled completely.
    Then Jack breathed, "Hell."
    He slung his arm around Hattie, picked up Arty's pint and drained the remains. "But now I'm back, and I'm bound to raise a little infernal noise of my own." He kissed Hattie, hard, smearing her lips apart and probing with his tongue. Hattie yielded like an understaffed doll.
    Pete became aware that the music had faded to the end of the track and the club was largely silent, everyone waiting to see what Jack would do next.
    Arty cast his eyes at a few fellows of comparable size and thickness. "Sure, Winter. Play your set. Let all of them see what a bad man you are." He slid from his stool like a small mountain moving. "Hell or not, hasn't helped you much. You look bloody wasted." The other boys came to his shoulders.
    Pete pointed her finger at Arty. "Don't," she warned.
    "What are you going to do, curse me?" he sneered.
    Pete looked to Jack, who was fondling Hattie with a bored expression as he glared at Arty. His eyes flicked to hers for a second, and he was still Jack.
Make an impression
.
    Arty grabbed the lapel of Pete's jacket. "I asked you a question, you slag."
    The DJ began another song, and Pete hit Arty in the jaw, in the soft spot just above the bone that snaps the head around and brings unconsciousness.
    She raised her eyes to the other boys. "Jack doesn't need your meddling and I don't want you breathing my air. Piss off."
    Abby jumped in between Pete and the boys. "They didn't
mean
it!" she cried. Arty groaned and sat up, shaking his head. "How could you?" she hissed at him.
    "Winter's not a sorcerer!" he said defensively. "How's I supposed to know he practices bloody black magic?"
    "I practice whatever I bloody want," Jack said. He slung his other arm around Abby. "Let's leave off these cunts and find someplace private, eh, luv?"
    Abby fairly glowed. "Of course! I know just the place."
    Jack, Hattie, and Abby walked through the room, dancers parting like a furrow, and Pete followed before the passageway closed and she was trapped. Every set of eyes in the room bored holes in her back until the door boomed shut behind her.

----
Chapter Thirty-six

    Abby took them to a turreted Victorian, black with red light shining from every window. She lifted the iron knocker, a fanged nymph's head, and let it fall once.
    "What is this place?" Pete stopped at the foot of the steps.
    "Mad Chen's," muttered Hattie. She let Jack half drag her up to the door. Pete looked up and down the street. Dead trees and dead leaves bent and scuttled toward her, a winter wind pushing behind.
    "Pete." Jack jerked his head at her as the door opened and a hooligan in a silk jacket peered out. He looked at Abby, nodded, and then stepped back.
    Mad Chen's was lit by gaslight, red as new blood spilling, burning some sort of alien fuel. Thick wispy smoke drifted toward the tin ceilings, painted over with spray-can slogans, and under the smoke a garden of beds lay scattered across the wide rooms.
    The beds were of every description—day lounges and iron institutional frames. All made up in silk or satin, no filthy mattresses like where Pete had found Jack.
    Most of the beds were occupied, and slow-moving, doe-eyed women passed among them holding long boxes and trays with pipes and small sticky globs of pungent brown in wooden boxes. Their breasts and nipples, ringed or studded or tattooed, gleamed in the low red light.
    "Up here," said Abby as they passed through the main part of the den, and she led them up a spiral staircase and into a narrow hallway.
    Some of the doors had a key sticking out,